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What a beautiful spring day in the Northeast yesterday! The kind of day that makes you, right now, wherever you are, city folks or out in the country, snuggled in quilts or riding the bus, just turn to the nearest Real American around you, even your own reflection in the mirror and . . . just . . . sing:

It’s springtime for Donald and Vladimir!
Winter for NATO and Ukraine
Putin’s Manchurian Candidate
Is helping Make Russia Great Again!

Oh, it’s springtime for Donald and Vladimir,
Winter for Syrian refugees
Sorry if your doctor’s Iranian,
And judges belong on their knees

Yes, it’s springtime for Donald on Twitter
Please get your facts from Kellyanne
Congress had better just smile and nod
When Spicer says it’s not a ban

It’s springtime for Donald and the alt-right!
The Times and the Post are fake news
Read Breitbart so you’ll be the first to know
When Bannon puts a ban on the Jews!

Now ev’rybody –

*Apologies to Thomas Pynchon (from whom I stole the intro) and Mel Brooks (who gave us this):

Everybody loves Martin Niemoller. Wikipedia will tell you he is famous for his “provocative poem about the cowardice of German intellectuals following the Nazis’ rise to power and subsequent purging of their chosen targets, group after group.” Here’s the original form of that poem, in case it hasn’t come across your Facebook feed lately:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.

It’s a lovely piece to quote: it reckons with the past, signals enlightenment and moral clarity, and challenges us all to live up to its ideals. You pretty much can’t help feeling a little more ethical and upright when you read it. Still, before we get too complacent, I’d like to ask you to accompany me, and Niemoller, on a short tour of recent American economic and political history. I want to see if we’ve really learned to speak up for others as well as we think we have. Humor me, you don’t really mind, do you?

First they came for the Socialists — this feels like a quaint anachronism now, but the Socialist party was highly relevant politically in the United States in the early 1900’s. The Socialists had two representatives in Congress and high water marks of 6% of the popular vote in the 1912 presidential election for socialist Eugene Debs and almost 17% in 1924 for socialist-supported progressive Robert LaFollette. (By contrast, Gary Johnson won 3% and Jill Stein won 1% of the popular vote in 2016.) Within 25 years, discredited by American politics and world events, the Socialists were more or less irrelevant in the U.S., winning less than 0.1% of the presidential vote from the 1950’s on. Some people did speak out, but the tide was against them. You and I weren’t around then, in any case.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists — much of this happened in our lifetimes. Labor unions were highly influential in the United States for most of the 20th century, especially during what’s known as the Great Compression, the period following the New Deal reforms when income inequality declined dramatically. From Wikipedia:

This “middle class society” of relatively low level of inequality remained fairly steady for about three decades ending in early 1970s, the product of relatively high wages for the US working class and political support for income leveling government policies.

This is clear in this chart that tracks income inequality over time. This income leveling correlates well to labor union membership, which grew steadily during the New Deal, and eventually reached almost 35% — more than 1 in 3! — of salaried workers in 1954. Union membership gradually declined from that point. The best statistics start in 1983, when around 20% of the work force still belonged to unions, and they show another 50% decline to just 11% of the work force in 2015. For my generation (I am in my mid-40’s), and for the so-called new economy, I think we can say that we’ve played out Niemoller’s script pretty much as written: few of us were unionists, and few of us have paid attention as union influence declined throughout our working lives. (Uber rides are cheap and convenient, so who cares if the drivers have no rights and the company can raise its take from fares at will? I bet a hundred years ago there would have been a strike.)

Then they came for the Industrial Cities. Here I am talking about both big (Detroit, MI, population 1.85M in 1950) and small cities (Youngstown, OH, population almost 170K in 1960). Since then, both cities have shrunk by about 60%! The history of these cities (and many more like them) in the 20th century is a complex mix of economics, sociology, and racism, but here’s the world’s shortest introduction:

U.S. cities and industry in the North and Midwest grew rapidly in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, powered by a huge wave of European immigrants. Then World War I created a labor shortage, and blacks from the South migrated north to fill the gap. This began the Great Migration of blacks to cities in the North and (eventually) the West. Apart from a short break during the Great Depression, the migration continued for the next 40-50 years, transforming the black population from 80% rural-20% urban to the exact opposite — 80% urban-20% rural — in little more than half a century.

As they came to the white-dominated cities, incoming blacks were steered to neighborhoods with lower economic opportunity and investment, away from whites, a morally bankrupt process known as redlining. (For a history of redlining that goes beyond Wikipedia, read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s mighty essay, The Case for Reparations.) Meanwhile, whites tended to concentrate in their own segregated parts of the same cities, and eventually to move away from the cities altogether as road networks improved (white flight). Some of the industrial jobs that brought blacks to the cities went to the suburbs with the white population, some began to go overseas, and some were lost to automation, with the latter trend showing no signs of abating. In just 20 years (1967-1987), Philadelphia, New York City, Detroit, and Chicago all lost over 50% of their manufacturing jobs. Some cities managed to reorient around the technology or financial sectors (Boston, New York), while others lost significant population and income that they’ve never regained. (For more on the relationship between lost industrial jobs and inner city poverty, you can read William Julius Wilson; here is a short summary paper.)

Who spoke out for these cities, for their minority populations and for their financially starved schools? Not those whites who moved to the suburbs to get away from blacks, and not the mainstream Democratic party of the 1980’s and 90’s, which decided it needed to distance itself from inner city concerns in order to win elections. Maybe you did?

Then they came for the Heartland. Or perhaps for the U.S. manufacturing economy, depending on whether you prefer to view things geographically or economically. This has been the subject of much debate since the election, because Trump’s margin of victory came from three “Rust Belt” states (PA, MI, WI) that he had been expected to lose, and because it’s believed that his margin of victory in those states came from dissatisfied white working class voters either seeking change or lashing out either at bullying elites or at bullied minorities or immigrants. (This is probably a lousy explanation of voter dynamics in Pennsylvania.) Frustratingly, these discussions have devolved into arguing over whether these voters are motivated by economic or social-cultural factors (as though it were easy to separate the two) and whether they deserve sympathy (as though we’ve never seen anyone bully others while being bullied at the same time).

No matter how you view the politics here, we should be able to come to some kind of agreement on the economic facts. Here’s a recent article suggesting that the Rust Belt is not a struggling region, because other parts of the country are worse off: the states we are talking about are all in the middle third of U.S. states by median income. Sure, they’re not Connecticut or California, but they’re not Arkansas or Mississippi either. This is true enough as far as it goes, but it fails to consider decline. As a quick back-of-the-envelope exercise, I pulled up the income data and sorted the states top to bottom by median income as of 2015 and as of 1995. Here’s what I found:

The state with the biggest decline in ranking over the last 20 years (from #5 to #28)? Wisconsin.

The state with the second biggest decline (from #14 to #31)? Michigan.

Five of the ten states with the biggest drop in ranking form a contiguous region at the heart of the Rust Belt: Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. (There are no other clusters; the other five states are completely non-contiguous.)

At this point, these Rust Belt jobs are more likely lost to automation than to other states or countries (though there is some of the latter) or incoming immigrants from lower-income countries (virtually none coming into the Midwest). So it’s hardly clear what to do. Still, there’s not much sympathy for these people’s plight on my Facebook feed, where most people (1) have college or graduate degrees and professional occupations, (2) live in desirable areas, and (3) are frustrated and terrified, as I am, to see Trump in power.

Then they came for — OK, who’s next? Are you? What job will you have in twenty years, or what job will your children have, when:

The technology sector, which is not very labor intensive, and also finds it easy to move jobs around or offshore, is coming to dominate the (non-service) economy. (Just to give you an idea, Facebook is the 7th most valuable company in the world and employs only 13,000 people, a fraction of the workforce of the industrial behemoths of 50 years ago, whose employees numbered in the hundreds of thousands.)

The gig economy is rising, and there doesn’t appear to be an obvious limit on what kind of jobs can be gig-ized. (Gig workers have even less leverage than long-term employees.)

The financial industry, which has grown rapidly over the last several decades, provides relatively little economic value relative to the human capital invested in it, and might be ripe for contraction. You could speculate that the same might be true of marketing as well (another industry where too many of the well-educated settle), or at least that it could be done more cheaply. If our news stories can be replaced by crap written on the cheap in Eastern Europe, why not the ads?

Shifting into my ominous Rod Serling voice: with the manufacturing economy gone, both in the cities and out, with more and more people shifted into low-wage service jobs, with labor as powerless as it seems it’s ever been, with our economy sliced up into strata, and the humans in each one of those strata cut away in turn — who will be left to speak for you when they come for you? And how will you feel with Niemoller’s warning, turned into prophecy now, running on a loop over and over, not just on your Facebook feed but inside your head?

I have an 8:00 meeting this morning, so I’m going to take the early (6:36) bus in. I almost never go in this early, so to be safe, I am already downstairs putting on my shoes at 6:29. Sometimes I joke that I live so close to the bus stop that if I hear the bus from the second floor window of my house, I still catch it as it goes by. That’s an exaggeration, but not by much. Now I hear a sound outside that could be the bus, but I know it’s not, it’s never this early. Still, I peek out the door.

It’s the bus, already on the corner. Crap.

I dash out. The bus stop is diagonally across from my house, and fortunately, the bus is waiting at a red light. This gives me a chance: I run down to the corner and across the street with the light. Now the bus and I are facing each other, I wave, cross the other way when the light turns as the bus waits an extra couple seconds, and get on. I am feeling good about the world and my place in it.

Still, 6:29, that’s super-early. Unless maybe this is the previous bus, running super-late? I think I should say something to the driver. “Excuse me, which bus on the schedule is this?” It’s the morning, everything is rushed, who knows if I actually said “Excuse me.”

The bus driver, not one I’m familiar with, is not pleased. He barks at me: “It’s whatever bus it is when I get here!” I look behind him, see the bus is mostly empty. I know from experience that if it were the previous bus, running late, it would be overcrowded, so this must really be the 6:36. I give the driver my ticket and try to explain: you’re running way too early, people who count on this bus will miss it, then the next buses are overcrowded and run late, etc. I ask him to wait a few minutes to get back on schedule. He remains very hot, says (yells) that I better stop talking to him, threatens to call the police if I don’t get away from him. The good thing about him yelling at me is that the bus is still not moving. A couple people, breathless from running down the street, get on the bus while we’re going back and forth. I count this as a small victory.

A large man walks up the aisle from the back of the bus. I am hoping for a little support from a fellow commuter. “You better fucking stop talking to him so he can go!” he yells at me. “You’re holding the bus up! He’s going to call the cops!” This guy looks like he’d like nothing better than to slug me. “He’s calling the cops!” The bus driver is not calling the cops. My fellow passenger, though he is louder than the driver, does not actually take a swing at me. I sit down in one of the many empty seats.

The bus doesn’t move.

I take my book out of my bag and try to disappear into it. It is eerily silent. In moments of suspense, time feels suspended. The bus still doesn’t move.

Finally, after what must have been only a short wait but didn’t feel that way, the bus huffs and trundles forward. I check the time. It is exactly 6:36. We have been waiting for just a few minutes.

I mull things over as the bus heads into the city. I feel good that I managed to stay calm through the whole episode. Maybe this will be a good story to tell the children — the importance of keeping your cool. It occurs to me that the bus driver ended up doing exactly what I asked him to — waiting to leave until he was scheduled to, to the minute. Or was that just a coincidence? Something makes me decide to talk to him again, though I can’t tell exactly how or why I make that decision.

The bus pulls in to Port Authority. I am going to wait for everyone else to get off and then try to approach the driver. As the people ahead of me are getting off, I hear the usual end-of-trip courtesies: passengers say thank you, driver says you’re welcome or have a good day. That’s encouraging: this isn’t one of those guys who’s so nasty that people give up on saying thanks at the end of the ride.

Once is everyone else is off, I get off too. The driver is standing to the side. “Thanks for waiting a few minutes at the bus stop,” I say to him. “I wasn’t trying to pick a fight, I just…”

The driver is looking me in the eye. “Yeah, I know,” he says. “I get what you were saying.” I talk to him about the schedule, he says he understands, sometimes they get off schedule and it’s hard to keep track. We are talking to each other like people now. He says he’s sorry, and he seems totally sincere. I tell him my name, because that seems like a talking-like-people thing to do, and he tells me his. I was hoping to make peace, but this is more than I expected; in under a minute, our conversation has turned comfortably fraternal. I am feeling good about the world again as I head inside the bus terminal.

Now another man slides over to me. He is fiftyish, tall, thin, with slightly graying hair, wearing jeans and a blazer. “You know,” he says,”I saw the bus driver yelling at you, I got a video on my phone. I’m going to call the bus company.”

I don’t actually want him to call the bus company. I tell him that I just had a good talk with the driver, and that he seemed very direct and sincere. My companion isn’t impressed. “He’s just afraid for his job,” he says. He tells me that the driver has done this (I think he means run ahead of schedule) once before, that people were running for the bus and he didn’t care. He looks at me a little conspiratorially. “I think this guy just hates white people.”

Well. The driver, like the majority of bus drivers I encounter, is black. I am white. The guy I’m talking to now is white. The passenger who was yelling at me earlier is white. Most people on the bus are white, with a few exceptions. What is the logic here, how do you decide that a black man driving a bus full of mostly white people hates them because they’re white? Does the white man who came up to yell at me before hate white people too? Why do we look differently at angry black people than at angry white people?

The man I’m talking to is going his way and I’m going mine, and there isn’t time to ask these questions. But I as I walk up 8th Avenue on a sunny end-of-summer morning, I realize that I’ve lost the tidy story I was going to tell my kids about the virtues of keeping calm. And perhaps a bit of my confidence in those virtues as well.